The Heart Is a Shifting Sea: Love and Marriage in Mumbai

by Elizabeth Flock

  In the days after the funeral, Shahzad felt as if there was still dirt underneath his fingernails. No matter how often or forcefully he washed his hands, they never seemed to come clean.

  Sabeena did her best to comfort Shahzad, but she was soon distracted by trouble of her own. For weeks, her father had been acting anxious and jittery. He said he was worried about the marriage prospects of his other daughters. Not long after he began acting strangely, he went to the hospital for a hernia operation.

  It was a complicated surgery, but Sabeena’s father told his family it would be simple. He had problems with his heart, and so the operation was a risk, but he did not tell them this either. He had also arranged to have it done at a cheap hospital, which they did not know. Such hospitals were terrifying places, with instruments unsterilized, malpractice common, and reports of a thriving black-market organ trade.

  Sabeena was sleeping when a woman from the hospital came to their house late at night and told them that the operation had gone wrong. “He’s very serious, come soon,” she said, and Shahzad and Sabeena hurried to get dressed in the dark.

  By the time they reached the hospital, Sabeena’s father was dead. His heart had given out in the surgery.

  Sabeena knew immediately that her life would be divided into two parts: the time before and the time after her father’s death. She was twenty-seven, and perhaps she had already been an adult for years. But she saw she had not experienced true suffering until now.

  She did not understand why her father had not confided in her. She thought that perhaps it was because of lack of money. But when she got to her family home, crying as she climbed up the stairs past the paan spit and the hanging laundry, through the drafty room and into their messy front hall, she opened her father’s cupboard and found seventy-five thousand rupees—a large sum—inside.

  Not long after Sabeena’s father died, Shahzad went away to Dubai. He said he needed to be with his brother because of the continued shaming of his family over his uncle’s death, which Sabeena understood. But with Shahzad gone, she felt she could not talk to anyone—not her mother or sisters, who acted like sheep, or her brother, who was angrier than ever. The only person she wanted to talk to was her father. If he were here, though, she knew what he’d say. He would tell her to pray hard to Allah.

  * * *

  After Shahzad returned from Dubai, the 1992 riots took place, as if death begot more death, and on a larger scale.

  It started when he was in his shop at Byculla Market, listening to the radio, and heard news of a faraway mosque being burned to the ground. Right-wing Hindu groups had organized a rally, which devolved into a riot, which gave way to the demolition of the Babri Masjid, one of the largest mosques in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. The Hindu groups had been rallying to reclaim the birthplace of the god Ram, and the place where a Hindu temple supposedly once stood, before a Mughal emperor built a mosque in its place. The rally was organized, in large part, by the RSS, a volunteer Hindu nationalist group whose agenda was to push for a Hindu nation. A group that said India experienced a “golden age” until it was ruined by the Muslim Mughal kings. Men the RSS had sent to rally at the mosque shouted “Death to the Muslims!” as they destroyed it with pickaxes and hammers. Now, the Babri Masjid was rubble.

  As Shahzad listened to the radio, he thought the demolition didn’t sound like a rally that spontaneously transformed into a riot. To him, the destruction sounded preplanned. He wanted to keep listening to the news, but all the Muslims in the market were closing early. There was talk of violence in Mumbai, though they were many miles from the Babri Masjid. Maybe it had started already. Shahzad closed his shop and went to find his father, uncle, and cousin. They were all ready to leave. The buses and taxis seemed to have stopped running, and so they rushed home on foot instead. In the streets, they saw tires burning.

  As the men approached their mostly Muslim neighborhood, Shahzad heard what they all feared—that Muslims were coming out to kill Hindus in retaliation. And the Hindus would retaliate after that. This was how trouble often started in the country: all was calm among ordinary men until more powerful people lit a match. And then the violence spread like a market fire. But as Shahzad and his family passed their local tailor, who was Hindu, the man called out to them, his voice kind: “Come inside and sit until things are safe.” He had been their tailor for a long time, starting with Shahzad’s grandfather, followed by Shahzad’s father, and now Shahzad, always making the men special kurta pyjamas at Eid and Ramadan time. They were a block from home, but they hurried inside the tailor’s shop, which was attached to his home.

  Huddled in the tailor’s apartment, they heard that angry Muslims were burning more tires now and not letting any remaining public transport move. The police had come out, but it was rumored that they were protecting only Hindus.

  When they finally ran the last block home, Shahzad used the landline to call Sabeena, who was out visiting her mother and sisters. At least she is in a Muslim locality, Shahzad thought. So maybe she is safe. But Shahzad was also in a Muslim locality, and now there was a Hindu man outside throwing rocks at his window, trying to break the glass.

  There was a Hindu inspector who lived in the next building who Shahzad knew liked Muslims and Muslim culture. He played qawwalis—Sufi devotional music—almost every day. And so Shahzad called the inspector, who confronted the man slinging rocks. In Shahzad’s memory, the inspector held up his gun and said, “If you do that in my area, I will shoot you dead.”

  The man left, but the violence continued to rage. Muslims, furious over the demolition of the mosque, set public buses on fire, and Hindus damaged more mosques in the city. In the central neighborhood of Bandra, some people simply vanished, taken from their beds in the night. Men were torched alive, while women were stripped and gang-raped. Shops and homes were burned. On the trains Hindu men caught Muslim men whose beards gave them away and threw them onto the tracks. Muslim men stoned Hindus, shouting “Allah-hu-Akbar!” as they hit their targets. Police were also killed. When whole Muslim areas were set on fire, the police radioed, “Let it burn.”

  After four days, the violence waned, and Sabeena called Shahzad to beg him to bring them some milk. Her family had not eaten in days. Shahzad, who was growing more anxious the longer he stayed inside, and the longer he was away from Sabeena, was grateful to have a job to do.

  Outside, the streets were eerily quiet, as empty as he’d ever seen them. His destination was the Regal Theater downtown, which was three and a half kilometers away. Here, a store might be open. As he walked, he saw small fires in the road, but no one gave him any trouble. As he approached the theater, a bearded man called out, “Chali jao, they are killing Muslims still.” Shahzad nodded curtly and walked on. “Wapis jao, chalo,” the man shouted, his voice persistent. “It’s started again, they are killing Muslims. They are even putting poison in the milk and giving it.”

  Shahzad stopped, startled. He stared at the open shop by the theater, turned around, and went back home.

  As Shahzad told his family what he’d heard, they whispered that it was all a big plan, this killing of Muslims. They said that it didn’t make sense that Sharad Pawar, the defense minister, hadn’t immediately sent the army to help the police, and that many more Muslims were being killed because of the delay. Rumors began circulating that Prime Minister Narasimha Rao had been part of the planning of the mosque’s demolition, and that the RSS had gotten permission to stage their attack. The fact that the police had done nothing to stop the violence was only more evidence.

  For eight days, Shahzad did not see Sabeena. Curfew had been imposed on the city, and Shahzad’s family had very little to eat, just a stock of dry chapatis. Finally, the army came from New Delhi and declared that whoever continued to riot would be shot. Bit by bit, after the last fits of rage were expended, peace was restored to the city.

  The violence stopped, but Shahzad did not know how he or anyone else in Mumbai could forget what had taken pl
ace. Not all neighbors were like the tailor. Stories circulated about a neighbor who had murdered another, a shop owner who stoned a family he once fed, and a policeman who shot a man he’d been charged to protect.

  In the end, some nine hundred people were dead: the majority of them Muslims, but also many Hindus, and fifty who were not declared either way. Thousands more were injured. One of Shahzad’s doctors watched a man die by sword and went mad afterward. Shahzad’s brother-in-law witnessed a murder he would not talk about. In January, Shahzad realized that the Catholics had not celebrated Christmas.

  When Sabeena returned, she seemed different, as if she were holding a secret inside her. Finally, she told Shahzad what happened in Bhendi Bazaar. She said that police had broken soda bottles and told Muslims to kneel and walk on their knees on the broken glass until they bled.

  In the days to come, though, the city achieved a kind of equilibrium. The newspapers reported that the police were encouraging Muslims and Hindus to sit together in public spaces. But Shahzad and Sabeena could not so easily forget. They would be polite to the Hindus they knew, as they always had, but the riots had given them cause to be more cautious, and more pious. They had always been good Muslims, reading the Quran and performing their daily namaaz. Now, they both attached a deeper feeling to their faith.

  Shahzad thought back to his childhood, when he had learned from the local Catholic kids in plaid uniforms that they went to church just once a week. Once a week only. He’d marveled at the thought. Now, he felt that his five-times-a-day prayers weren’t enough.

  Sabeena read the Quran every night. During Friday prayers, while Shahzad was at the mosque, she fingered her tazbih necklace, like the Catholics did with their rosaries, repeating “Subhan Allah, Subhan Allah,” “Glory be to God,” thirty-three times, once for each bead. As Sabeena prayed, she remembered that her father had told her that the goal of any Muslim was to pray twenty-four hours a day, but that since she had other duties, she should just pray as much as she was able. After the attacks, she decided to move as close to that ideal as she could.

  * * *

  Not long after, there were bomb blasts in Mumbai, thirteen in a row. It was said to be retaliation for the demolition of the Babri Mosque and for all the Muslims who had been killed and raped and burned in the riots. And for all the pain and injustice Muslims had suffered over the years. India blamed Pakistan for the blasts, which Pakistan denied. This time, some 250 people were killed, and many more injured, most of whom were Hindus. The TV images were horrifying: severed limbs, contorted bodies, blood running in the road like a stream. While they didn’t condone the bombings, Shahzad and Sabeena were not surprised. This was a wound that had been deepening since Partition, maybe even from before. And like many Muslims, they felt that if Muslims did not retaliate, they would all be killed. Just one in ten people were Muslim, while eight in ten were Hindu; they could not stop the Hindus if they tried. First, their jobs would be taken away, then their rights, and finally their bodies, by Hindus who felt they could do what they wanted to the minorities of the country, as they had been emboldened to do since Partition.

  Once the blasts were over and life resumed normalcy, Shahzad fixated again on the lack of a baby. He continued to frequent priests and quacks and to hemorrhage money, attempting to change the unchangeable outcome with tests, powders, and pills. As he spent and spent, Sabeena recalled something else that the family doctor had told them: “You will spend lakhs”—hundreds of thousands of rupees—“and nothing at all will happen.”

  And yet Shahzad showed no signs of stopping. In fact, Sabeena thought it was as if her husband had become bimar, as if he was not well, suffering from some disease without a cure. The word bimari meant a physical illness, but Sabeena used it to describe Shahzad’s mental unrest, which had begun to seem almost physical. Her husband had always had a nervous demeanor, but now he seemed anxious all the time—as if he was anticipating a disaster she could not see. People in the community spoke of him in a certain way, always with the same subtext: There’s Shahzad, the mad one, the silly one, the one whose pants are too big and who sweats through his clothes. It was as if they were speaking of his father.

  Sabeena did not care what other people said. But she was growing more worried about her husband. Once, just being with her had made him happy. Now it seemed like nothing she did could calm him down. He had also become obsessive about washing his hands, often staying in the bathroom so long people had to bang on the door to get in.

  And he had started seeing an alternative doctor, a hakim, who practiced extreme methods. Once, he told Shahzad to go buy sweet paan from a corner shop, tie the tobacco’s betel leaf around his penis, and start a fire on the leaf to produce heat there. After this, the hakim promised him, “You’ll get a child very soon. In two, three months.” Shahzad followed his instruction, though it stung and burned. Months passed after the betel leaf experiment and still a child did not come. Shahzad stopped seeing the hakim, and moved on to an unani healer for his homemade powders and oils. Sabeena feared what expensive, harebrained scheme was next.

  And then it came: adoption.

  Shahzad got the idea after tracking down his childhood friend Atif, who had come out of hiding and gone back to karate after his wife’s father had given up and accepted the marriage. When Shahzad told his friend of his sterility problem, Atif’s answer was simple: “Just adopt.” Shahzad did not think adoption would go over well with his father. But Atif had a bold, persuasive way of speaking, and Shahzad convinced himself it would be easy.

  He asked his other friends about adoption. He had a Christian friend whose wife couldn’t get pregnant and chose to adopt. His friend told him it cost an exorbitant three lakhs but that the child’s parents never came back to bother them, which Shahzad worried would happen. “Is it pakaa that no one will bother you?” Shahzad asked. “Pakaa,” his friend said.

  Shahzad broached the subject of adoption with his mother, who seemed open to the idea, at least at first. But then his father, who rarely spoke to the rest of the family, let alone involved himself in their lives, reemerged with a firm opinion.

  No, came the answer, through Shahzad’s mother. Not in my home. No outsiders allowed. The one time Shahzad had brought a friend home for lunch, his father demanded the friend leave and sulked for days afterward at the imposition.

  But Shahzad thought a child might be different. A child could never be an outsider, at least in his mind. When Shahzad brought up the subject with Sabeena, he was surprised to find his wife agreed with his father. “An adopted child is an outsider,” she said.

  “But how can this be?” Shahzad asked.

  “You can adopt as a Muslim, but you cannot give him your name,” said Sabeena. She was sure on this point, which she had learned from her father. It was an old rule, interpreted from the Quran, which said that an adopted child was not equivalent to a biological one and should not take an adopted father’s name. “In the eyes of God it’s not your child,” Sabeena said.

  Over the coming decade, fewer priests in their community would enforce this rule on naming and adoption. And fewer people in their community would follow it. But in 1998, even in cities, priests were still being taught the most conservative interpretation of the Quran.

  And Sabeena showed Shahzad the passage, incontrovertible evidence, there in verses 4 and 5, sura 33. “Nor has He made your adopted sons your sons. Such is [only] your [manner of] speech by your mouths,” the passage read. “Call them by [the names of] their fathers: that is juster in the sight of Allah.”

  Shahzad wanted to be a good Muslim. But he couldn’t believe what he read. He couldn’t believe that God would prevent a couple from adopting a child in need. Even the Prophet Muhammad had adopted a son. And Atif, the Muslim he respected most, had been the one to suggest it. Shahzad wondered, in some back part of his brain, if Sabeena and the Quran both were wrong. If that were the case, he knew, he’d do whatever it took to get a child.

  A Suitable Match


  Ashok and Parvati, 2009 to 2013

  “What can I do for you? I smiled.

  A smile is such a detached thing . . .

  I want your photo . . .

  Sure. Just arrange my limbs and tell

  Me when . . .”

  —Kamala Das, “The Testing of the Sirens”

  Parvati was on the overnight train home when Joseph first spoke to her. She was a shy-seeming student with nerdish glasses, a heart-shaped face, and thick hair that had a habit of becoming unruly. She also didn’t socialize much at her university, so when Joseph approached her, she was surprised.

  “Hi,” he said, smiling, as friendly as if they knew each other well. Parvati barely recognized him from school. She appraised his brushy mustache, dark complexion, and glasses that were thicker than hers. She told herself she didn’t find him attractive. She did not know then that he was a Christian; if she had, she might have been even more dismissive. While there were many Christian boys down south—almost more than anywhere else in the country—they were still in the minority, and not meant for Hindu Brahmin girls like her.

  She and Joseph talked about their break, and then he retired to his train car. But the next morning he was back. “Let’s take an auto together when we get back to school,” he said, his voice earnest, and Parvati found herself nodding yes.

  Over her break at home in Trivandrum, a green and leafy city at the southernmost tip of the country, Parvati did not think of Joseph. Home was a sprawling compound filled with all kinds of trees—jackfruit, plantain, teak, mango, and coconut. Her mother used the coconuts to make curries. Home was shuttlecock and roller-skating with her older sister, who was her closest friend. Home was visits with her father, a devout Hindu Brahmin, to quiet, clean temples surrounded by even more trees.